


Regret Nothing Until It Is Too Late

by jolyful



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-12
Updated: 2013-09-12
Packaged: 2017-12-26 09:14:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/964217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jolyful/pseuds/jolyful
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos is tired and not in the mood for Cecil's ceaseless enthusiasm. Maybe next time he'll invite him in for coffee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Regret Nothing Until It Is Too Late

**Author's Note:**

> Set after episode 23, Eternal Scouts. Canon divergent, obviously, thankfully.

It’s been a bad day. Carlos has been working constantly since the early hours of the morning and he feels like he’s almost onto something, but the numbers won’t behave and he can’t find a causal link no matter how he draws the graph, so in the end he decides that he deserves some pizza, even though he has produced nothing useful all week.

It’s while out getting pizza that he runs into Cecil.

Cecil walks him home, talking animatedly the whole way.

Carlos hesitates, hand on the door handle, the words to invite Cecil to stay for a drink on the tip of his tongue, and then he doesn’t say them. Because Cecil is many things – generous, sincere, enthusiastic, wonderful – but Carlos is tired and Cecil can be overwhelming and he doesn’t need that right now. So he bids Cecil good night, trying to ignore the twisting feeling in his gut as Cecil’s entire face falls, and he goes straight to bed.

Feeling bad about his low tolerance, he calls Cecil in the morning. He’s not sure what kind of excuse he’s going to give for his bad mood last night, but he wants to try and smooth things over. It rings for a few moments, then goes to voicemail. Carlos frowns. That’s unusual. Usually Cecil picks up within seconds, unless he’s broadcasting, but Carlos knows his timetable off by heart and Cecil definitely isn’t on the air right now. _Still,_ Carlos thinks, _he could be doing anything. It’s not like he spends all day sitting by his phone waiting for me to call._

So Carlos gets himself some breakfast. This is a slightly problematic endeavour as a week ago, a magnetic black box about a cubic metre in size decided to materialise near his kitchen sink, and anything that gets within a metre of it is sucked towards it and vanishes. Carlos has already lost several shoes to it. So he has to carefully manoeuvre around it to get a bowl and some cereal. Given the box’s proximity to the sink, washing up has become impossible. Piles of dirty plates from the last seven days cover every surface. Carlos cowers in the corner clutching his bowl to his chest and scoops the cereal into his mouth as fast as he can.

An hour later, he goes back to his phone. Maybe Cecil has tried to call him back. But he hasn’t, so Carlos tries again. Still nothing.

 _Maybe there’s some kind of ritual necessary for making calls at this time of day,_ he contemplates, considering the handful of bloodstones Cecil had given him many months back without explanation, saying only, “Call me.”

That’s when he realises he’d planned to be analysing some grey goo he’d found in his kitchen right now and doesn’t have time for this moping. Cecil has every right to be too busy to answer his calls. He pulls on a lab coat, pulls himself together, and sets off for his laboratory.

The morning goes much the same as the rest of his week – uneventful, unfruitful. The grey goo, as he’d suspected, isn’t made of any elements known to traditional science, which makes his attempt to identify it rather tricky. He goes out for lunch. Pizza again.

There’s a bunch of people crowded in the middle of the road just outside Big Rico’s, all leaning over to stare fixedly at the cement. Carlos dismisses this as normal until he sees Cecil’s latest intern among the crowd. She spots him a few seconds later and approaches him with wide, red eyes and says, “Mr Scientist.” He looks past her and sees a puddle of the same grey goo he has been examining all morning.

“There was a big metallic black box,” she says, and Carlos’s heart sinks immediately. “Appeared last night. A-And Cecil went to t-touch it.” _Of course he did,_ Carlos thinks. “And he v-vanished. Replaced by this stuff.” She goes on, but he stops listening, moving towards the spot. People part for him and he can’t fathom why they would do that but he doesn’t care to think about it as he’s kneeling by the grey goo and sticking a finger in it, the last remnant of his Cecil.

“No,” he says finally. “He can’t – it isn’t _scientifically possible_. It’s all wrong, this town is all wrong.” He gets no response other than a few sympathetic looks and an eerie high-pitched whistle some lady somehow made with her nose.

It’s crossed his mind before, of course, the possibility of Cecil dying. One of the first things Night Vale showed him was how dangerous it is and how carelessly accepting its residents are of this. He’s aware of the risks, but he’s never believed it would actually happen, that he would ever actually lose Cecil. The radio presenter with his perfect voice has been a constant, pretty much the only consistency in Carlos’s time here.

 _Cecil._ His mouth forms curses but his vocal cords aren’t working. _There’s curiosity and then there’s stupidity, you stupid, stupid Cecil._

Unsure where to go or what to do, he returns home. The ominous cube still hangs in mid-air in his kitchen and he glares at it. “You can have all of my shoes you want,” he says fiercely, “just give Cecil back.” He takes all his shoes off the rack then and starts hurling them at the box, wishing they would impact its shiny metallic sides, leave a scratch, a gash in its unmarked exterior, but they are all sucked into nothingness without a sound.

When his last shoe is gone, that’s when he starts crying. He stumbles backwards until he hits the corner in which he huddled to eat his breakfast and slides onto the floor. He covers his face with his hands and he’s shaking and he knows he must look like a wreck but he just can’t stop. If he’d just let him stay over, at least for one drink, he could have warned him about the black box, he could have just given Cecil some caffeine. He could have listened to him speak the night away, not necessarily understanding the words, just embracing the voice.

That perfect voice which, because of his selfish desire for solitude last night, he will never hear again.

**Author's Note:**

> Today's proverb: Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.


End file.
